The government shutdown could be putting the nation's cybersecurity at risk.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Novosafo.

On this week's episode of Marketplace TechBites, week in review, we'll discuss the ongoing government shutdown and how it's caused a lapse in a law that's key to protecting the nation against major cyber attacks.

Plus, Open AI this week made a huge investment in Chipmaker AMD, the latest in a round of blockbuster deals.

And Google said it will be updating its

smart home devices with advanced artificial intelligence.

To discuss all of this, we're joined by Maria Curie, tech policy reporter at Axios,

and we began our conversation with the shutdown, still happening as of the taping of this

episode, and we talked about how it led to the

expiration of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, also known as Saiza.

Saiza basically offers companies a liability shield so that they can share information with the

government and with each other. Much of our critical infrastructure

sectors are run by these private companies. Think about telecommunications or the grid. These are all

private companies. And so they need to be able to share information with each other and with the

government without running into legal issues, you know, having to do with antitrust or

with disclosure requirements. This basically shields them so that they can share that information

without having to fear, you know, a lawsuit. And so this has allowed for a lot of cooperation

over the last 10 years, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I can point to a recent example. Salt Typhoon is one

cybersecurity issue that was detected last year. It was a group of Chinese hackers who basically

hacked into our telecommunication systems. They targeted Donald Trump. They targeted over a million people in the D.C. region. And

ultimately, they were able to be taken down because companies like Verizon and AT&T were able to

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